'The Method' – a Review

 by Kirk Woodward

[I’ve published many articles on Rick On Theater on the subjects of acting and actor-training.  Some were by me—I trained as an actor and have an MFA degree in acting—and some have been by other authors. 

[One of those other writers has frequently been my friend Kirk Woodward, also an actor (though primarily a playwright, composer, and director).  Kirk’s also a great reader and has contributed reports on many fascinating books, both about theater and other fields.  Now he comes back to ROT with a review of a new book about one of the most famous theories of acting and actor-training, The Method.

[Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act is the latest in a long line of books and articles about director and teacher Lee Strasberg’s groundbreaking adaptation of the theories and teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian founder of modern Western acting, the dominant technique of most of the 20th century.

[One interesting fact about Butler’s The Method is that it’s not a rave as far as his experience with and judgment of the acting style is concerned.  He’s well worth hearing out, though . . . and so is Kirk.  ~Rick]

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) is a “biography” of an approach to acting that was first identified and codified in Russia, brought to this country by refugees, taught by a raft of colorful characters, modified by teachers, directors, and books, embedded in this country’s consciousness amid numerous social changes, and ultimately absorbed into the mainstream of entertainment here and worldwide.

The ultimate victor among “Method” approaches was the one taught for decades at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Butler writes: 

The Method has many definitions, but to instructors of stage acting, it refers very specifically to the techniques and values taught by Lee Strasberg [1901-1982], the most famous and prominent adapter of [Konstantin] Stanislavski’s ideas in the English-speaking world.

(Stanislavski lived from 1863 to 1938.) Butler writes that “The primacy of the actor’s lived experience, the necessity of breaking down both a role and a process into bits, and the goal of using a conscious process to access and manipulate inspiration are the foundation of Stanislavski’s ‘system’” (the Russian’s name for what became known as the Method).

Most prominent among the “techniques and values” developed by Stanislavski and central to the Method is the practice of Affective Memory, in which an actor, through exercises, learns to locate, call up, and reexperience highly charged emotional moments in the actor’s past, with the aim of ultimately being able to apply them to the emotions of a character in a play.

Interestingly, Butler says, “While the ‘system’ would always be associated in America with naturalism, Stanislavski first developed it in order to bring psychological truth to abstract, symbolist works,” which is quite the opposite of what I had imagined.

Butler says that in an acting class he took at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s,

There were two goals . . . . First, the class would be able to observe how strong emotion actually worked, as opposed to the cliched ways we indicated emotion onstage. The other purpose was to help us find potential keys to unlock our emotions so we could use them in our work.

There are three interesting elements to that report of his acting class experience. The first is that, as far as he knew, the Studio Theatre’s instructors were not specifically committed to the Method at all; by the 1990’s they almost certainly considered it outdated and, as taught by Strasberg, even dangerous.

The second is that those two goals described above are a good high-level description of the Method, particularly as it was taught by Strasberg, even if the teachers did not profess to be committed to it.

The third is that for Butler it was dangerous – he feels he became emotionally damaged by Affective Memory, and he left acting altogether.

Butler knows theater first hand.  (If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been likely to say, for example, that “In rehearsals, directors perform more than actors do.” It takes having “been there” to know that.) Today he teaches theater history and performance at the New School in Manhattan. He co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward, a narrative of the success of Angels in America by Tony Kushner (b. 1956). He has hosted podcasts on Shakespeare and the creative process, and co-created 2015’s song cycle Real Enemies. He is an excellent guide to the world of theater history.

In his Introduction Butler efficiently addresses the two enormous currents of opinion about acting, that it is an “external” or an “internal” matter (that is, based on the observation and presentation of observable traits, or on a character’s psychology). Assuming that’s a real dichotomy (the argument is never finished), the Method definitely leans toward the latter.

Before reading this book I thought I was reasonably familiar with the history of acting. I realize now that I hardly knew anything; I have learned a great deal from this volume, and will certainly reread it. Out of a wealth of information, let me present a few examples from early chapters of the book.

I knew almost nothing about the relationship between the two men who founded and led the Moscow Art Theater (MAT – and not exactly its official name) in its first phase: Stanislavski and the splendidly named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943). For that matter, I didn’t know that Nemirovich-Danchenko was a theatrical artist in his own right, a director, playwright, and teacher.

I had assumed that his and Stanislavski’s relationship was roughly equivalent to that of Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) and George Balanchine (1904-1983), who together created and ran the New York City Ballet. Kirstein dedicated his career to furthering Balanchine’s and invested a great deal of money in it.

“The only justification I have is to enable Balanchine to do what he wants in the way he wants to do it,” Kirstein wrote. He handled the administrative side of the company, allowing Balanchine the opportunity to choreograph freely.

On the other hand, Stanislavski (a stage name, incidentally – I hadn’t known that), although he led on the artistic side, was the one who had the money, and he refused to use it to help underwrite the new MAT. He and Nemirovich-Danchenko had different opinions as well on artistic matters from the beginning.

They more or less agreed to split duties as Kirstein and Balanchine did, but neither was comfortable with the arrangement; they argued, then fought, then stopped speaking altogether. Yet their theater somehow progressed.

I did not know how close the MAT came to closing, not just once but many times. In fact Butler shows that its entire history was fraught with peril, some of it from inside, some external, as first the Czar and then the Communists endangered both the enterprise and the lives of those engaged in it.

Of course, generally speaking, all theater is precarious financially, unless it receives a state subsidy or some other regular flow of funds. In Europe, some theaters (particularly in Germany) enjoy such subsidies; in the United States, basically none have, with the exception of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), part of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945).

However, the MAT was precarious in life-and-death ways as well. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who began his career working with Stanislavski and developed his own approach to acting, ended up murdered under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) because of his artistic opinions, which the regime rejected, and he wasn’t the only one to pay that price.

I did not know that Stanislavski throughout his life was uncertain just how his “system” worked, an uncertainty that fed into endless disputes, particularly in the United States, about exactly what he meant and whether he meant it only provisionally or permanently. 

The story goes on, and so, for me, did the surprises, as the Method took shape and was transmitted from Russia, later the U.S.S.R., to western Europe and the United States, to become, like the immigrant population that brought it over, assimilated into the culture. Among the most influential of those who landed here were Richard Boleslawski (1889-1937), Michael Chekhov (1891-1955), and Maria Ouspenskaya (1876-1949), all of them major contributors to the field of acting instruction.

[See “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” posted on this blog on 2 May 2011, and the three-part profile of Michael Chekhov, 2, 5, and 8 November 2019.]

Similarly to what happened to Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis, the Method was ultimately modified and supplemented until it’s inaccurate to say today that many of our major actors are Method actors at all.

In fact – another surprise – two performers frequently described as outstanding examples of Method actors really aren’t. Marlon Brando (1924-2004), whose work for many embodied the Method, denied that Lee Strasberg taught him anything; he credited his teacher Stella Adler (1901-1992), whose approach spectacularly diverged from Strasberg’s in 1934. Robert DeNiro (b. 1943) has typically approached his roles through immersive external character study that is not part of the Method at all.

Butler says that “what he [Stanislavski] was describing was, at its core, ineffable.” That fact did not stop many from trying to describe the ineffable as the years went on, through teaching, and in books, beginning with The First Six Lessons (1933) by Richard Boleslawski (aka: Boleslavsky) and Stanislavski’s The Actor Prepares (1936).

But why “ineffable?” What’s so difficult about describing how acting works? The answer surely is that life is complex, and acting, which in some way or other imitates life, borrows from that complexity. As a result, acting is a bundle of opposites, including such enormous pairs as spontaneous and planned, mundane and extravagant, practical and spiritual, entertaining and educating, and so on.

These pairs continually synthesize themselves in whatever the actor is doing at the moment. Sometimes one element predominates, sometimes another. I referred earlier to Stanislavski’s uncertainty about exactly what his “system” was and how it worked. We should look at this uncertainty as a virtue more than as a fault. If acting is anything, it is a continual process of discovery. It changes as life changes.

And then, in a way, it doesn’t – another paradox. If we imagine two actors, perhaps one from 1722 and one from 2022, being able to meet and compare notes, on the one hand they would find their acting styles vastly different, and the same would go for the theories and techniques they applied to their craft.

On the other hand, they would immediately relate to each other as they traded stories about performance catastrophes, backstage quarrels, shortcuts for remembering lines, abusive theater managers and directors, missing paychecks, and so on.

So “it’s a mad world, my masters,” this world of acting, and The Method does it justice, particularly as it describes the remarkable group of characters who populate the story along the way. For illustration I will pick just one story, which perhaps actors may relate to. Lee Strasberg, directing a play for the Group Theatre (1931-1941), was often particularly demanding of his cast.

During a rehearsal, an actor made a small physical mistake, which she immediately corrected. Strasberg asked her, “Why did you do that?” She said it was a mistake, forget it, let’s move on. Strasberg wouldn’t let up. He kept demanding, “Why did you do that?” while the rest of the cast waited.

Finally another actor, known as one of the nicest in the ensemble, said quietly to the person next to her, “Now I’m going to kill him.” She charged Strasberg, fingers open to strangle him. Two other actors held her back. Strasberg ran from the theater and quit as director of the show.

Not your usual rehearsal story, but then The Method features an outlandish cast of characters. Butler is an excellent guide through the thickets of personalities, and theories, too. He recognizes that schools of acting, like other artistic trends, don’t come out of a vacuum; they both react to and intensify what’s going on in society around them. About the wide range of acting styles in recent decades he writes:

The end of the Method era in American culture had no single source. No new Stanislavski arose to lead a war on the prior generation’s hokum. The Method suffered instead the same fate that befell the postwar consensus in which it had been so firmly ensconced. Both began to lose their grip on America in the mid 1970s as the blockbuster, the inflation crisis, and revelations of decades of government wrongdoing struck the nation simultaneously; both stumbled into the 1980’s, punch-drunk and overmatched by a new vision of American society and its citizens. Before, our tax dollars went to advance the common good; now they would be returned to us so we could express ourselves through our purchasing power – helping others, the conventional wisdom went, through helping ourselves. Before, we were bound in common cause – individuals, yes, but part of a society and dedicated to its advancement; we were now to be consumers in a marketplace.

One wonders if it would be possible today for a “school” of acting to raise the almost religious fervor that culminated in the Method: the belief that changing the way people acted on stage would also change the world.

This seems an outlandish hope today, but it was a commonplace during much of the history described in The Method, emerging first in the minds of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and appearing most spectacularly in the Group Theatre (1931-1941), with Harold Clurman (1901-1980) quite literally preaching the doctrine that society needed a new approach to acting that would change the way it saw itself.

Sometimes that expectation almost seemed to happen, as with the production of Waiting for Lefty (1935) by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), a play that vividly presented the struggle between labor and capital – but certainly did not resolve it.

Does acting change us or reflect us? Another conundrum! In any case, acting is no longer limited to the stage, film, and television. It has sprawled along with the diffusion of types of media. It would be fascinating to know how a book would describe the next thirty years of acting styles and techniques.

It’s a sure bet that there will be plenty to say. Meanwhile, we have The Method to give us a vivid and useful look at where we’ve come from.

[Before there was Strasberg’s Method, or even Stanislavski’s System, there was François Delsarte, the first man who tried to codify and systematize the training of actors.  I posted a profile of Delsarte, whose theories were the founding principles of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (founded in 1884), on ROT on 4 January 2014; see “The Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte.”]